Israel has reduced the number of hostages that it wants Hamas to free during the first phase of a new truce in Gaza, according to three Israeli officials, offering a hint of hope for cease-fire negotiations that could restart as soon as Tuesday.
For months, Israel had demanded that Hamas release at least 40 hostages — women, older people and those who are seriously ill — in order to secure a new truce. Now the Israeli government is prepared to settle for 33, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss the sensitive matter.
The change was prompted partly by the fact that Israel now believes that some of the 40 have died in captivity, according to one of the officials.
The shift has raised expectations that Hamas and Israel might be edging closer to sealing their first truce since a weeklong cease-fire in November, when Hamas released 105 captives in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners. A senior Hamas official, Izzat al-Rishq, said on social media on Monday that Hamas was studying a new Israeli proposal, but did not say what the proposal was.
Hamas and its allies captured roughly 240 Israelis and foreigners in their attack on Oct. 7, which prompted Israel to go to war in Gaza. More than 130 hostages are believed to still be held in Gaza, but some are thought to have died.
Negotiations over a new pause, mediated by Egypt and Qatar, have stalled for months over disagreements about the number of hostages and prisoners who should be exchanged in a future deal. Another obstacle has been whether Israel would allow civilians from northern Gaza who fled the Israeli invasion to return to their homes, and how many would be permitted to do so.
The length of a cease-fire has also been a key stumbling block. Hamas wants it to be permanent, while Israel wants another temporary pause so that it could still send troops into Rafah, the last major Gazan city under Hamas control, though one where more than a million displaced Palestinians have sought shelter. Far-right members of Israel’s ruling coalition have threatened to bring down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government if the war ends without Hamas’s total defeat.
A mid-ranking Israeli delegation is planning to fly to Cairo on Tuesday to restart talks mediated by Egypt, but only if Hamas also agrees to attend, according to two of the Israeli officials.
Hamas did not respond to a request for comment about Israel’s offer and whether it will send representatives to talks in Cairo.
Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, said at the World Economic Forum in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Monday that Israel had made an “extraordinarily generous” offer and that Hamas alone stood in the way of a deal.
Sameh Shoukry, the Egyptian foreign minister, said at the same conference that he was “hopeful” about the latest cease-fire proposal, but did not say what it involved or who had proposed it.
“The proposal has taken into account the positions of both sides,” Mr. Shoukry said, adding that “we are waiting to have a final decision.”
Vivian Nereim and Edward Wong contributed reporting from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke with Arab officials on Monday in Saudi Arabia about the war between Israel and Hamas and the difficult issues it has created, from humanitarian aid to hostages. Mr. Blinken plans to travel to Jordan and Israel on Tuesday.
After landing in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, shortly after dawn, Mr. Blinken met with Prince Faisal bin Farhan, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, and then with foreign ministers and a top foreign policy adviser from five other Arab nations in the Persian Gulf that, along with Saudi Arabia, form the Gulf Cooperation Council. Prince Faisal was also part of that second meeting.
The State Department listed the cease-fire and hostage issues first in the summary it released of Mr. Blinken’s one-on-one meeting with the prince. The two “discussed ongoing efforts to reach an immediate cease-fire in Gaza that would secure the release of hostages held by Hamas,” the department said.
The two diplomats also talked about greater regional integration and “a pathway to a Palestinian state with security guarantees for Israel,” the summary said. That was a reference to negotiations over a broad deal that would involve the United States, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Palestinian representatives agreeing to terms that would result in the creation of a Palestinian state and greater diplomatic recognition for Israel in the region.
Mr. Blinken planned to meet with Arab and European officials in a group later on Monday to talk about plans for rebuilding Gaza, even though Israel is still carrying out its war there and has not stepped back from its difficult — and perhaps impossible — goal of fully eradicating Hamas.
Saudi Arabia is hosting a three-day meeting of the World Economic Forum, and top Arab officials, including Mr. Blinken’s diplomatic counterparts, are attending the event in Riyadh. The gathering includes senior ministers from Qatar and Egypt, the two Arab mediators in multiple rounds of talks over a potential cease-fire between Israel and Hamas.
“The quickest way to bring this to an end is to get to a cease-fire and the release of hostages,” Mr. Blinken said in an onstage talk with Borge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum. “Hamas has before it a proposal that is extraordinarily generous on the part of Israel. And at the moment, the only thing standing between the people of Gaza and a cease-fire is Hamas.”
“I’m hopeful they will make the right decision and we can have a fundamental change in the dynamic,” he added.
Mr. Blinken and other top aides of President Biden have also been trying to push for a long-term political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which is where the broader deal comes in. In a call meant to pave the way for Mr. Blinken’s trip, Mr. Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel spoke by phone on Sunday afternoon for nearly an hour.
The two leaders discussed “increases in the delivery of humanitarian assistance into Gaza,” according to a White House statement released after the call, and Mr. Biden repeated his warning against an Israeli ground assault on Rafah in southern Gaza. He also reviewed with Mr. Netanyahu the negotiations over a hostage release.
In their best-case scenario, the Biden administration envisions Saudi Arabia and perhaps a few other Arab nations agreeing to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel. In exchange, Saudi Arabia would receive advanced weapons and security guarantees, including a mutual defense treaty, from the United States and a commitment for U.S. cooperation on a civilian nuclear program in the kingdom.
For its part, Israel would have to commit to a concrete pathway to the founding of a Palestinian nation, with specific deadlines, U.S. and Saudi officials say.
“I think it’s clear that in the absence of a real political horizon for the Palestinians, it’s going to be much harder, if not impossible, to really have a coherent plan for Gaza itself,” Mr. Blinken said at the public talk on Monday.
Prince Faisal said Sunday that Saudi officials hoped to discuss concrete steps toward creating a Palestinian state during Mr. Blinken’s visit to Riyadh. Calling the war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza “a complete failing of the existing political system,” he told a news conference that the kingdom’s government believes that the only solution is “a credible, irreversible pathway to a Palestinian state.”
Before the war started last October, U.S. and Saudi officials were in intense discussions to reach an agreement on the terms of such a proposal. For those negotiators, a big question at the time was what Israel would agree to. Since the war began, the Americans and the Saudis have publicly insisted that Israel must agree to the existence of a Palestinian state.
But Israeli leaders and ordinary citizens have become even more resistant to that idea since the Oct. 7 attacks, in which the Israeli authorities say that Hamas and allied gunmen killed about 1,200 people and took about 240 people as hostages. Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including thousands of children, say officials from the Gaza health ministry.
Vivian Nereim and Zolan Kanno-Youngs contributed reporting.
World Central Kitchen said on Sunday that it would resume operations in Gaza with a local team of Palestinian aid workers, nearly a month after the Israeli military killed seven of the organization’s workers in targeted drone strikes on their convoy.
Israeli military officials have said the attack was a “grave mistake” and cited a series of failures, including a breakdown in communication and violations of the military’s operating procedures.
The Washington-based aid group said that it was still calling for an independent, international investigation into the April 1 attack and that it had received “no concrete assurances” that the Israeli military’s operational procedures had changed. But the “humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dire,” the aid group’s chief operating officer, Erin Gore, said in a statement.
“We are restarting our operation with the same energy, dignity, and focus on feeding as many people as possible,” she said.
The aid group said it had distributed more than 43 million meals in Gaza so far and that it had trucks carrying the equivalent of nearly eight million meals waiting to enter the enclave through the Rafah crossing in the south. World Central Kitchen said it was also planning to send trucks to Gaza through Jordan and that it would open a kitchen in Al-Mawasi, a small seaside village that the Israeli military has designated as a “humanitarian zone” safe for civilians, though attacks there have continued.
Six of the seven workers killed on April 1 were from Western nations — three from Britain, one from Australia, one from Poland and one with dual citizenship of the United States and Canada. The seventh was Palestinian. They were killed in back-to-back Israeli drone strikes on their vehicles as they traveled toward Rafah after unloading food aid that had arrived by sea.
The attack prompted World Central Kitchen to immediately suspend its operations in Gaza and elicited outrage from some of Israel’s closest allies.
The World Central Kitchen convoy’s movements had been coordinated in advance with the Israeli military, but some officers had not reviewed the coordination documentation detailing which cars were part of the convoy, the military said.
Some 200 aid workers, most of them Palestinians, were killed in Gaza between Oct. 7 and the attack on the World Central Kitchen convoy, according to the United Nations. A visual investigation by The New York Times showed that, well before the World Central Kitchen attack, six aid groups in Gaza had come under Israeli fire despite sharing their locations with the Israeli military.
The episode forced World Central Kitchen to decide between ending its efforts in Gaza or continuing, “knowing that aid, aid workers and civilians are being intimidated and killed,” Ms. Gore said in the statement.
“Ultimately, we decided that we must keep feeding, continuing our mission of showing up to provide food to people during the toughest of times,” she said.
At a memorial in Washington for the World Central Kitchen workers on Thursday, the group’s founder, the celebrity chef José Andrés, said that there were “many unanswered questions about what happened and why,” and that the aid group was still demanding an independent investigation into the Israeli military’s actions.
The seven aid workers had “risked everything to feed people they did not know and will never meet,” Mr. Andrés said. “They were the best of humanity.”
Israeli officials increasingly believe that the International Criminal Court is preparing to issue arrest warrants for senior government officials on charges related to the conflict with Hamas, according to five Israeli and foreign officials.
The Israeli and foreign officials also believe the court is weighing arrest warrants for leaders from Hamas.
If the court proceeds, the Israeli officials could potentially be accused of preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip and pursuing an excessively harsh response to the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, according to two of the five officials, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.
The Israeli officials, who are worried about the potential fallout from such a case, said they believe that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is among those who might be named in a warrant. It is not clear who might be charged from Hamas or what crimes would be cited.
The Israeli officials did not disclose the nature of the information that led them to be concerned about potential I.C.C. action, and the court did not comment on the matter.
Arrest warrants from the court would probably be seen in much of the world as a humbling moral rebuke, particularly to Israel, which for months has faced international backlash over its conduct in Gaza, including from President Biden, who called it “over the top.”
It could also affect Israel’s policies as the country presses its military campaign against Hamas. One of the Israeli officials said that the possibility of the court issuing arrest warrants had informed Israeli decision-making in recent weeks.
The Israeli and foreign officials said they didn’t know what stage the process was in. Any warrants would require approval from a panel of judges and would not necessarily result in a trial or even the targets’ immediate arrest.
Karim Khan, the court’s chief prosecutor, has previously confirmed that his team is investigating incidents during the war, but his office declined to comment for this article, saying that it does not “respond to speculation in media reports.”
Mr. Netanyahu’s office also would not comment, but on Friday the prime minister said on social media that any intervention by the I.C.C. “would set a dangerous precedent that threatens the soldiers and officials of all democracies fighting savage terrorism and wanton aggression.”
Mr. Netanyahu did not explain what prompted his statement, though he may have been responding to speculation about the arrest warrants in the Israeli press.
He also said: “Under my leadership, Israel will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense. The threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state is outrageous. We will not bow to it.”
Based in The Hague, the I.C.C. is the world’s only permanent international court with the power to prosecute individuals accused of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. The court has no police force of its own. Instead, it relies on its 124 members, which include most European countries but not Israel or the United States, to arrest those named in warrants. It cannot try defendants in absentia.
But warrants from the court can pose obstacles to travel for officials named in them.
The Hamas-led raid last October led to the killing of roughly 1,200 people in Israel and the abductions of some 250 others, according to Israeli officials. The subsequent war in Gaza, including heavy Israeli bombardment, has killed more than 34,000 people, according to Gazan officials, caused widespread damage to housing and infrastructure, and brought the territory to the brink of famine.
The Israeli assault in Gaza has led the International Court of Justice, a separate court in The Hague, to hear accusations of genocide against the Israeli state and has spurred a wave of protests on college campuses in the United States.
If the I.C.C. does issue arrest warrants, they would come with deep stigmatization, placing those named in them in the same category as foreign leaders like Omar al-Bashir, the deposed president of Sudan, and Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian president, who was the subject of a warrant last year tied to his war against Ukraine.
The I.C.C.’s focus on individuals rather than states differentiates it from the International Court of Justice, which settles disputes between states.
The I.C.C. judges have ruled that the court has jurisdiction over Gaza and the West Bank because the Palestinians have joined the court as the State of Palestine.
Mr. Khan has said that his team will be investigating incidents that have occurred since Oct. 7 and that he will be “impartially looking at the evidence and vindicating the rights of victims whether they are in Israel or Palestine.”
Mr. Khan’s office has also been investigating allegations of war crimes committed during the 2014 war between Israel and Hamas; one of the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity believes the new arrest warrants would be an extension of that investigation.
Hamas and the Israeli military did not respond to requests for comment. The office of Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister, declined to comment.
In general, Israeli officials say that they fight according to the laws of war and that they take significant steps to protect civilians, accusing Hamas of hiding inside civilian areas and forcing Israel to pursue them there. Hamas has denied committing atrocities on Oct. 7, saying — despite video evidence to the contrary — that its fighters tried to avoid harming civilians.
The entrance hall to the Galilee Medical Center in northern Israel is mostly empty and quiet. Roaring warplanes and the intermittent thunder of artillery have replaced the sounds of doctors, orderlies and patients at this major hospital closest to the border with Lebanon.
Nearly all of the hospital’s staff members and patients have gone underground.
Getting to the hospital’s nerve center these days involves navigating past 15-foot concrete barricades and multiple blast doors, then descending several floors into a labyrinthine subterranean complex.
That is where thousands of patients and hospital workers have been for the past six months as strikes have intensified between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, the powerful Iranian-backed militia in Lebanon, just six miles to the north.
The underground operation at Galilee Medical Center in Nahariya is one of the most striking examples of how life in northern Israel has been upended since Hezbollah began launching near-daily attacks against the Israeli military in October in solidarity with Hamas, the Iranian-backed group that led the attack on southern Israel that month.
The cross-border fire has prompted tens of thousands of Israelis to evacuate towns, villages and schools and forced factories and businesses to close. On the Lebanon side of the border, tens of thousands more have fled their homes.
The hospital had been preparing for such a scenario for years, given its proximity to one of the region’s most volatile borders.
“We knew this moment would arrive, we just didn’t know when,” Dr. Masad Barhoum, the hospital’s director general, said in an interview last week.
Hours after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, Galilee Medical Center staff members feared that Hezbollah might mount a similar assault. Even before the government issued evacuation orders, hospital executives decided to relocate most of the vast complex to an underground backup annex. They reduced the 775-bed hospital to 30 percent capacity in case it needed to suddenly accommodate waves of new trauma patients.
“It’s our duty to protect the people here,” Dr. Barhoum said. “This is what I’ve been preparing for my whole life.”
The hospital’s towering internal medicine ward now stands empty, its wide, neon-lit hallways wrapped in silence. In the ward’s current location below ground, the whirs of hospital machinery mingle with the beeps of golf carts carrying supplies through narrow tunnels that open into the hospital’s parking lot, offering the only hint of sunlight.
Patients lie in beds separated by mobile curtain racks in a maze of halls. Visitors sit on plastic chairs in a makeshift waiting room, since the space is too crowded to allow everyone to pay a bedside visit. Tubes and wires running across the ceiling give the space the feeling of an engine room.
In the neonatal intensive care unit, new parents in protective gowns huddle to bottle-feed their baby in a dimly lit room. Doctors perform a procedure on another tiny patient a few feet away.
The neonatal unit was the first to move below ground on Oct. 7, said Dr. Vered Fleisher Sheffer, the unit’s director.
“While everyone feels safer here,” she said, “it’s challenging because we are humans, and now we must stay underground.”
Her unit also went underground in 2006, during Israel’s last all-out war with Hezbollah: Dr. Fleisher Sheffer recalls commuting to the hospital along barren roads as air-raid sirens blared. A rocket hit the ophthalmology ward one day, but the patients had already been moved, hospital officials said.
That war lasted just over a month, and the threat from Hezbollah was felt less in the years that followed. Oct. 7 changed that.
The day before New York Times journalists visited the hospital, a Hezbollah strike hit a nearby Bedouin village, injuring 17 soldiers and two civilians. The injured were brought to the hospital’s I.C.U., where one of the soldiers died on Sunday.
“These are our neighbors,” Dr. Fleisher Sheffer said, referring to the Hezbollah militants. “It’s not like they are going anywhere, and neither are we.”
